Former President Donald Trump on Friday defended his widely criticized comment that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country," dismissing outcry that his language espoused Nazi rhetoric by saying he is "not a student of Hitler," The New York Times reports. During a radio interview, conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt requested Trump explain his remark and asked him multiple times to respond to those outraged that his phrase echoed statements made by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his bigoted manifesto, "Mein Kampf."
The former president said he put no racist intentions behind the statement, adding, “I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works.” News articles, biographers and books about his presidency, however, have indicated that Trump has a long history of interest in Hitler. His first wife, Ivana Trump said she had seen him occasionally leaf through a collection of Hitler's speeches that a friend had given him. In Friday's interview, Trump continued to defend his comment, noting that "poisoning the blood" differs from passages in "Mein Kampf," in which Hitler uses "poison" and "blood" to outline his views on how outsiders tainted Aryan racial purity. “They say that he said something about blood,” Trump said. “He didn’t say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.”
